In July, the Oregon Health Plan injudiciously sent a letter to lung-cancer patient Barbara Wagner denying coverage for the expensive chemotherapy her doctor had recommended, and offering instead to cover palliative care “including doctor-assisted suicide.” The firestorm of outrage this letter triggered (to see the outrage for yourself, simply Google the search terms “Barbara Wagner” and “suicide”) penetrated even the dulled sensibilities of the Oregon insurance executives. One Jim Sellers, a s

The Oregonian has an editorial up highlighting the fact that the state-run Oregon Health Plan won’t cover a terminal patient’s chemotherapy but will pay for them to die. Opponents of physician-assisted suicide are fired up this summer, and rightfully so, over an ethically questionable provision of the Oregon Health Plan. The conflict came to light in a recent report in The Register-Guard of Eugene. The newspaper described the sad plight of Barbara Wagner, a 64-year-old Springfield woman wi

A couple of weeks ago Drew blogged on a short essay/case report in Journal of Clinical Oncology that addressed a physician’s struggle in prescribing chemotherapy that he considered to be futile. The same day I got my latest issue of Oncology with an article (with 2 invited responses, here and here) on patient demands for chemotherapy that clinicians feel is futile. I believe this is the inaugural offering in the new feature, “Areas of confusion in oncology.” The Oncology article is a fairly wid

Leslie Hanks is a dear friend of mine and friend of this blog. She posts comments here using the moniker, “lesforlife.” She is an integral part of American Right to Life and also runs the Passionate Prolifer blog. Leslie’s family has recently received unfathomable news about one of her 22-month-3-year-old twin granddaughters, Tuesday. As her friend Judy explained in an email: Tuesday… has just been diagnosed with adrenal cancer and is sufffering through chemotherapy since the tumor is inope

At title font family Arial,Sans Serif. Mimicking invasive garden weeds, a single errant root portion can allow the tumor to regrow, despite attempts at levaquin. Although a plethora of literature compares the efficacy of various chemotherapy drugs against one another, no literature has compared the drugs to supportive care alone. Am J Clin Nutr IS S, December. In these circumstances how does bone marrow transplantation help in the treatment of cancer Is it not the chemotherapy that plays havoc